One can continuously grow a stock if they reduce the shares outstanding.
That being said iirc buy backs have notoriously all gone to executives. Essentially they buy back, and then award themselves options to re-dilute, but cannot readily find a source for that. So maybe incorrect.
When a business does a stock buyback, the business receives the stock, not any executive(s).
The business might pay the executive with stock per the board approved compensation package, but a CEO does not wake up and say “I want to give myself 5M shares so let’s do a 5M share buyback”.
A buyback benefits all shareholders equally by reducing supply of the stock and therefore increasing its price.
It's not that executives receive the bought back stock, but that their stock based compensation plans result in no net decrease in the amount of outstanding shares.
